The main XFS feature pull was sent in on Friday for Linux 5.9 and includes a wealth of improvements for this mature file-system:
- Inode flushing with XFS is now fully asynchronous. Additionally, memory reclamation is no longer blocked on inode flushing.
- A long-standing bug in the quota code was addressed where soft limit warnings and inode limits never ended up being tracked properly.
- An extensive refactoring to the xattr and quota code in preparing for future improvements.
- The direct access (DAX) behavior between EXT4 and XFS has been further stabilized.
- Various efficiency improvements and other code improvements.
More details on all of the XFS changes for Linux 5.9 via this pull request by XFS maintainer Darrick Wong of IBM.